Wiki143:Articles for deletion/Re Lear

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was no consensus to delete. W.marsh 21:21, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Re Lear

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Delete This is a might-have-been opera, a project which never took off. According to Julian Budden (who wrote a three volume work on the composer) Verdi never wrote any music and it's unlikely that Cammarano ever did more than a few rough drafts. Nothing remains of his work. (Another librettist actually did more.) (This is explained in more detail on the talk page.) It is an interesting subject that deserves to be covered in detail on the composers' biography page, however it would be confusing to everybody to have an article on it and have it listed among his works. If we had an article on every project considered by every composer, writer etc. WP would be unusable. Thanks. -- Kleinzach 09:35, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

• Delete - per Kleinzach. It's operatic fancruft. We scarcely need an article on an unfinished libretto that no one ever wrote any music for. Moreschi ^Talk 10:40, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
• Merge and redirect to Giuseppe Verdi. There is a good case for keeping articles on some unfinished works of art, particularly if they were later completed or were sufficiently advanced that they could be completed if someone had the inclination. It's hard to devise a firm rule for those situations, but an article on a work here where nothing survives is likely to be worth keeping only if it has already received substantial coverage elsewhere (for example if its non-completion became a career-defining issue with patrons or collaborators). However, per the discussion at Talk:Re_Lear, this one doesn't seem to come anywhere near that sort of significance threshold, but it probably still deserves a brief mention in his bio, hence the merge and redirect !vote --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 10:47, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

Comment This is delete rather than merge and redirect because (1) there is nothing to merge. The present brief article doesn't have any useful or correct information, and (2) a redirect from Re Lear to Guseppe Verdi would be potentially confusing. -- Kleinzach 22:22, 18 May 2007 (UTC) (Article has now been revised to include some worthwhile information.) -- Kleinzach 06:35, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

• Merge and redirect (or DAB if necessary) per BHG. It looks like it figured enough in his life to merit a mention somewhere, but not enough to have an article. I can see someone reading through a bio or letters of his and coming across the name and wondering what happened to the opera, and he's a major enough guy that, although not every sneeze is notable, I think at least some of his unfinished works are mentionable. Mak (talk) 11:25, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

• This AfD nomination was incomplete. It is listed now. DumbBOT 11:39, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

• Keep; first, it passes the main notability criterion: [1] [2]. Second, a merge target is not as obvious as it may appear. Since the libretto was written by Cammarano, it should be merged there rather than to the Verdi article. Tizio 11:48, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

Comment The libretto wasn't written by Cammarano, or if it was it's disappeared. After Cammarano died in 1852 Verdi approached Antonio Somma. Somma did apparently finish the libretto. I don't know if it still exists. (I don't believe any composer has ever used it.)

• Delete Never even started, rather than unfinished. It falls into the same category as Debussy's As You Like It (the poet Paul-Jean Toulet was too doped up on opium to write a line of the libretto) and Berlioz's projected Anthony and Cleopatra (a passing idea mentioned in his letters). Interesting to speculate why these were all taken from Shakespeare, but none of them deserve an article to themselves. Might be worth mentioning Re Lear in Verdi's bio alongside his other Shakespearean works when discussing the composer's passion for W.S. .--Folantin 14:37, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
• Delete, but incorporate the salient points into the Verdi article. Budden (vol 2, p. 362) refers to "Naples, the home of [the late Salvatore] Cammarano, who had drafted the first scenario", which clearly implies that he never wrote a full libretto. Wikipedia has no article on Somma, a now-forgotten playwright whose rather slight claim to notability is his adaptation (under the guidance of Verdi) of Eugène Scribe's libretto for Auber's opera Gustavo III to form the libretto of Un ballo in maschera. --GuillaumeTell 15:16, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
• Keep and possibly rename as "Verdi's Re Lear project". The project is quite significant in Verdi's career and has attracted scholarly interest (e.g. [3],[4] and G. Carrara "Verdi, Per il Re Lear", Parma, Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani, 2002). Verdi even signed a contract to compose the opera, which features prominently in his letters to Cammarano, to whom he wrote "Cheer up, Cammarano, we have to make this Re Lear which will be our masterpiece". Stammer 21:47, 19 May 2007 (UTC). I'll add a conversational remark. The reason why this project has attracted so much interest is that it kept haunting Verdi for fifty years and is paradigmatic of his enduring fascination with Shakespeare. It is about "the Shakespeare play with which Verdi struggled for so many years, but without success" ( [5], p.3). The article does not tell the story yet, but it's a good, properly sourced seed. Stammer 09:48, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Comment The project was indeed of importance to Verdi etc., but should we have articles about projects that never started? The New Grove Dictionary of Opera doesn't list unrealized projects, neither does Oxford. If you look up Lear in opera sources you get Reimann. Who says Cammarano completed the libretto? If true why did Verdi go to Somma? I agree with your main points but in this case the sources do not match the text. -- Kleinzach 09:28, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

• Keep How notable we think it is in Verdi's career is not the question. Whether there are others who think it notable is the question. I wouldn't necessarily have thought it was, going by guesswork, the encyclopedia is not supposed to reflect our guesswork, but what we find in the sources. but since there have been published works dealing specifically with it, then it's certainly notable & I'm glad to have learned something.DGG 03:13, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Comment Do you think we also need articles on Beethoven's Macbeth, Benjamin Britten's Anna Karenina and Ligeti's Alice in Wonderland? They are notable - even if they don't exist. -- Kleinzach 09:28, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Of course not! What we need is more articles like this one. By the way, I have beefed up the article a bit. Stammer 15:07, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Comment But an opera libretto by a non-notable author that was never set to music can't be notable, can it? (Even when the article is strewn with (gasp!) references.) The correct place in WP for a substantial paragraph on Verdi and King Lear is in Giuseppe Verdi. --GuillaumeTell 17:37, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

I already suggested renaming the article. Verdi's Re Lear project is firmly established in the sources. In my opinion the article has potential for growth. ... in 1896, at age 83 Verdi offered all his Lear material to young Pietro Mascagni who asked "Maestro, why didn't you put it into music?" According to Mascagni, "softly and slowly he replied 'the scene in which King Lear finds himself on the heath terrified me.. Interesting, huh? It's sourceable, though maybe it ain't WP:NOTABLE. Oh well ... . Stammer 19:37, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Comment The article (now corrected) is about Somma's Re Lear libretto. Do we know if it still exists? Was it ever used by any composer? You obviously have read the references - which we don't have access to - can you tell us what they say? Can you give us some quotations on the subject of the libretto? Thanks. -- Kleinzach 00:13, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Both versions of the Somma libretto are reproduced in Giuseppe Verdi - Antonio Somma, Per il “Re Lear”, G. Carrara Verdi ed., Parma, Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani, 2002, which also contains a variant of Somma's first version with notes and suggestions written by Verdi himself, as well as the correspondence between Verdi and Somma. Afaik Somma's libretto was never used by anyone else. It may have been part of the package that Mascagni turned down. As for the other references, I do not have them here, but their titles and what can be glimpsed online clearly confirm the scholarly notability of the topic. The Mascagni story excerpted above is told by Mascagni himself (in Italian), by Carrara, by G. Mendelsohn ([6]), as well as by many others, with various operatic variations. Stammer 05:25, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for more details about the Somma libretto. I think this brings us back to GuillaumeTell's point: an opera libretto by a non-notable author that was never set to music can't be notable. -- Kleinzach 06:33, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

I think I already addressed this point twice, suggesting to rename the article. The relevant topic here is not Somma's libretto, but Verdi's Re Lear project. Somma's librettos, Cammarano's sketch, the relevant Somma-Verdi and Somma-Cammarano correspondence, the San Carlo contract, the Mascagni story and the scholarly articles about Verdi and Re Lear are part of it. Merging would unfocus the topic. Since it has a distinct scholarly identity and it can be expanded, I'll stick to keep. Stammer 07:13, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.